Defective Promethean Boards plague school district

WFCourier: ActivBoard warping has been a problem

WATERLOO - As many as a quarter of the electronic white boards installed in Waterloo Community Schools' classrooms have had to be replaced due to warping problems.

District officials said Promethean blamed problems with the ActivBoards on a manufacturing process no longer used. The company has replaced more than 200 affected boards at no cost to the district. More than 700 boards have been installed in district schools, including all classrooms and libraries, at a cost of just over $4 million.

"It's one of those things where they've seen sporadic warping across the country, but not as much as we've had here," said Matt O'Brien, the district's technology coordinator....

"Supporting these boards has put a much higher-than-expected strain on our department due to a pattern of failures, many of which we feel stem from product design issues," O'Brien wrote in the letter. He called warping of the boards the "most concerning" of the problems, "causing images to be distorted and making accurate calibration impossible."

...In the letter, O'Brien also outlined a number of other problems with the boards. Among those were a counterweight system that often did not function properly, causing the boards to float upwards; a "poorly-designed" locking mechanism with "an incredibly high failure rate" that magnified the counter-weight problems; "mild to overwhelming" humming in the majority of the speakers attached to the boards; and a "poorly designed" power port on the back of the boards that often works itself loose during raising or lowering...

...After installation of 138 boards in a Waterloo Schools pilot program during the fall of 2008, district administrators began getting complaints about the warping. Eventually, Promethean replaced 113 boards - all but 25 of those initially purchased. Nearly the same amount were replaced during the first months of this year following expansion of the project.

"They just replaced another 100 boards," said Morlan. "Of those 100 boards replaced, some of them are repeat offenders."